Foreign News: Slaughter in Kenya

A band of Kikuyu women, naked except for thongs of leather tied round their shaven heads, recently stole out from a bamboo thicket on the slopes of the Aberdare Mountains in Kenya. Armed with shiny pangas, they crept into a Kikuyu village, killed three Kikuyu men and a 14-year-old boy. The victims were Kikuyu guards, loyal to the white men and pledged to fight the Mau Mau.

The women walked half a mile down a jungle track, dragging with them the severed head of one of the men they had slain. They showed it to his widow before slowly strangling her with the thongs that they wore. Then they hacked her four children to pieces and disappeared.

Such butchery by the Mau Mau, male and female, is fast becoming commonplace in the rich and sorrowful land of Kenya Crown Colony. In the twelve months since Governor Sir Evelyn Baring declared a state of emergency, the Mau Mau has murdered 730 Africans. 16 whites, eleven Indians.* In return. British troops have killed 2,340 Africans in battle; have hanged 89 and jailed 27,000, have 149 of them awaiting execution. The fighting has busied five full battalions of British infantry with supporting troops (6,750 men) and 3,000 African levies; it costs the shuddering colony more than $820,000 a month —one-fifth of its revenue. One high-ranking British officer announced last week that “conditions are no better, and in many respects are worse, than they were a year ago.”

Crosses of Blood. On their great rolling ranches where the big game roams, Kenya’s white settlers have built 30-ft.-tall watchtowers with big searchlights to overlook their cattle camps and the Negro labor lines, which are enclosed with barbed wire. In their teeming reserves, terrified Kikuyu watch in awe while the Mau Mau drill in the open, black foreheads glistening with crosses painted in blood, hoarsely chanting to the gods: “Grant us power to drive out all whites.”

Most of the Mau Mau have been driven by British patrols into the tangled vastness of the Aberdares. But of late, their Central Committee (whose members are unknown even to Mau Mau adherents) has been urging terrorist action in Nairobi itself, which in the first days of the emergency was relatively safe. In the capital’s stinking slums, 100,000 Kikuyu (most of them not Mau Mau) sleep where they can. rocking their babies in sacks that are festooned around mud-hut walls. Fortnight ago, Mau Mau sent a message to these teeming slums: “Africans will stop using mzungu [white-owned] buses, and will stop smoking cigarettes.” For emphasis, they strangled one bus-using, cigarette-smoking Kikuyu and tossed his body into the Nairobi River. Overnight, every Negro in the capital, from government-employed clerks to road sweepers and shop assistants, stopped using the buses and stopped smoking cigarettes.

Body in a Sack. Only half a block away from swank Delamere Avenue, police caught one Mau Mau gang initiating new members (by forcing them to drink blood, and eat a sheep’s entrails). Last week Banasio Kahangara, son of the Paramount Chief of Lari who was murdered this spring (TIME, April 6), was found in a sack on Main Street, strangled.

From Nairobi’s panicky whites went a wail for regular troops to clear out the Negro locations. This meant withdrawing British infantrymen from their battle stations in the mountains, but Commander in Chief General Sir George Erskine could not resist the clamor. Six hundred young Inniskilling Fusiliers, in jungle-green uniforms and black berets, marched into Nairobi last week with orders to screen every African in the city. “Nairobi wants to rid itself of between 15,000 and 20,000 Negroes who are living in the city without permission,” said Police Chief John Timmermann. The cops admitted that they could not keep any more Kukes in jail because “our prisons and detention camps are already too full.”

Last week Governor Baring confessed to the boys of Prince of Wales school that “Kenya will still be in a state of stress when you are middle-aged.” General Erskine had to agree. “The situation is no longer purely military,” he gruffly announced. “There is no military answer to white-black tension . . . Bullets alone will not finish the Mau Mau.”

* Thirteen more white settlers have killed themselves by their clumsy handling of their own guns.